Ours Story
by Fomax
Summary: Rogue is the feisty daughter of Duke Logan Dancanto. Remy LeBeau, the "Le Diable Blanc,", is sent by the Thieves Guild to wage war against Dancantos. When Remy's brother, Henry LeBeau, kidnaps Rogue and her stepsister, Kitty, and brings them to Remy's camp, the lives of the two become intertwined.
1. Chapter 1

Hello everyone ^ ^" Its my first fanfic so please be patient and nice =). I don't own nor X-men or anything else…

**LE DIABLE BLANC BARGAIN…( small glimpse in the story)**

"You said I am too proud and I—I am," Rogue said, laying her hand on Remy's chest in desperate supplication. "If you will let my sister go, I'll do any humble task you give me. I swear I'll repay you in a hundred ways."

"Please," Rogue whispered, "I'll do _anything_. You have only to tell me what you want."

"I want you in my bed." he said huskily. Rogue hand fell away from his tunic. Behind them her sister's coughing rose to a terrible crescendo and she shuddered with alarm.

"Do we have a bargain?" he asked, and when she hesitated, he stated calmly, "In truth, I have no need to bargain with you at all, Chere, and you know it. I want you, and if that makes me a barbarian in your eyes, then so be it, but it doesn't have to be that way…Do we have a deal?" Remy asked, his long fingers sliding up and down her arms in an unconscious caress…

**Chapter One**

"A toast to the Prince of Thieves Remy LeBeau and his bride!"

Under normal circumstances, this call for a wedding toast would have caused the lavishly dressed ladies and gentlemen assembled in the great hall at D'ancanto manor to smile and cheer. Goblets of wine would have been raised and more toasts offered in celebration of a grand and noble wedding such as the one, which was about to take place here in New Orlean.

But not today. Not at this wedding.

At this wedding, no one cheered and no one raised a goblet. At this wedding, everyone was watching everyone else, and everyone was tense. The bride's family was tense. The groom's family was tense. The guests and the servants and the hounds in the hall were tense. Even the first earl of Dancanto's, whose portrait hung above the fireplace, looked tense.

"A toast to the Prince of Thieves Remy LeBeau and his bride!" Henri LeBeau, the groom's brother pronounced again, his voice like a thunderclap in the unnatural, tomblike silence of the crowded hall. "May they enjoy a long and fruitful life together."

Normally, that ancient toast brings about a predictable reaction: The groom always smiles proudly because he's convinced he's possesed something quite wonderful. The bride smiles because she's been able to convince him of it. The guests smile because, amongst the nobility, a marriage connotes the linking of two important families and two large fortunes—which in itself is cause for great celebration and abnormal gaiety.

But not today. Not on this fourteenth day of October, 1725.

Having made the toast, the groom's brother raised his goblet and smiled grimly at the groom. The groom's friends raised their goblets and smiled fixedly at the bride's family. The bride's family raised their goblets and smiled frigidly at each other. The groom, who alone seemed to be immune to the hostility in the hall, raised his goblet and smiled calmly at his bride, but the smile did not reach his eyes.

The bride did not bother to smile at anyone. She looked furious and mutinous.


	2. Chapter 2

In truth, Rogue was so frantic she scarcely knew anyone was there. At the moment, every fiber of her being was concentrating on a last-minute.

"The marriage contracts have been duly signed. Bring in the priest," Lord Magneto commanded, and Rogue's breath came in wild, panicked gasps, all thoughts of potential sacrifices fleeing from her mind. "_God_," she silently pleaded, "_why are You doing this to me? You aren't going to let this happen to me, are You_?"

Silence fell over the great hall as the doors were flung open.

The crowd parted automatically to admit the priest, and Rogue felt as if her life were ending. Her groom stepped into position beside her, and she jerked an inch away, her stomach churning with resentment and humiliation at having to endure his nearness. If only she had _known_ how one heedless act could end in disaster and disgrace. If only she hadn't been so impulsive and reckless!

Closing her eyes, Rogue shut out the hostile faces of the guests, and in her heart she faced the wrenching truth: Impulsiveness and recklessness, her two greatest faults, had brought her to this dire end—the same two character flaws that had led her to commit all of her most disastrous follies. Those two flaws, combined with a desperate yearning to make her father love her, as he loved his stepsons, were responsible for the debacle she'd made of her life:

When she was fifteen, those same traits had caused her to behave in such a way that old Lord Magneto withdrew his request for her hand, and in doing so destroyed her father's cherished dream of joining the two families. And those things, in turn, were what got her banished to the abbey, where, seven weeks ago, she'd become easy prey for the Le Diable Blanc marauding army.

And now, because of all that, she was forced to wed her enemy; a man who had captured her, held her prisoner and destroyed her reputation.

But it was too late for prayers and promises now. Her fate had been sealed from the moment, seven weeks ago, when she'd been dumped at the feet of the arrogant beast beside her, trussed up like a feastday partridge.

Rogue swallowed. No, before that—she'd veered down this path to disaster earlier that same day when she'd refused to heed the warnings that Le Diable Blanc, armies were nearby.

But why _should_ she have believed it, she cried in her own defense. " _Le Diable Blanc_, _is marching on us_!" had been a terrified call of doom issued almost weekly throughout the last five years. But on that day, seven weeks ago, it had been woefully true.

The crowd in the hall stirred restlessly, looking about for a sign of the priest, but Rogue was lost in her memories of that day…

At the time, it had seemed an unusually pretty day, the sky a cheerful blue, the air balmy. The sun had been shining down upon the abbey, bathing its Gothic spires and graceful arches in bright golden light, beaming benignly upon the sleepy little village which boasted the abbey, two shops, thirty-four cottages, and a communal stone well in the center of it, where villagers gathered on Sunday afternoons, as they were doing then. On a distant hill, a shepherd looked after his flock, while in a clearing not far from the well, Rogue had been playing hoodman-blind with the orphans whom the abbess had entrusted to her care.

And in that halcyon setting of laughter and relaxation, this travesty had begun. As if she could somehow change events by reliving them in her mind, Rogue closed her eyes, and suddenly she was there again in the little clearing with the children, her head completely covered with the hoodman's hood…

"Where are you, Jamie Madrox?" she called out, groping about with outstretched arms, pretending she couldn't locate the giggling nine-year-old boy, who her ears told her was only a foot away on her right. Grinning beneath the concealing hood, she assumed the pose of a classic "monster" by holding her arms high in front of her, her fingers spread like claws, and began to stomp about, calling in a deep, ominous voice, "You can't escape me, shugar."

"Ha!" he shouted from her right. "You'll no' find me, hoodman!"

"Yes, I will!" Rogue threatened, then deliberately turned to her left, which caused gales of laughter to erupt from the children who were hiding behind trees and crouching beside bushes.

"I've got you!" Rogue shouted triumphantly a few minutes later as she swooped down upon a fleeing, giggling child, catching a small wrist in her hand. Breathless and laughing, Rogue yanked off her hood to see whom she'd captured, mindless of her hair with unique white streak tumbling down over her shoulders and arms.

"You got Mary!" the children crowed delightedly. "Mary's the hoodman now!"

The little five-year-old girl looked up at Rogue, her hazel eyes wide and apprehensive, her thin body shivering with fear. "Please," she whispered, clinging to Rogue's leg, "I—I not want to wear th' hood—'Twill be dark inside it. Do I got to wear it?"

Smiling reassuringly, Rogue tenderly smoothed Mary's hair off her thin face. "Not if you don't want."

"I'm afraid of the dark," Mary confided unnecessarily, her narrow shoulders drooping with shame.

Sweeping her up into her arms, Rogue hugged her lightly. "Everybody is afraid of something," she said and teasingly added, "Why, I'm afraid of—_of frogs_!"

The dishonest admission made the little girl giggle. "Frogs!" she repeated, "I likes frogs! They don't scar me at all."

"There, you see—" Rogue said as she lowered her to the ground. "You're very brave. Braver than I!"

"Lady Rogue is afraid of silly of frogs," Mary told the group of children as they ran forward.

"No she isn't" young Sam began, quick to rise to the defense of the beautiful Lady Rogue who, despite her lofty rank, was always up to anything—including hitching up her skirts and wading in the pond to help him catch a fat bullfrog—or climbing up a tree, quick as a cat, to rescue little kitten who was afraid to come down.

Sam silenced at Rogue's pleading look and argued no more about her alleged fear of frogs. "I'll wear the hood," he volunteered, gazing adoringly at the seventeen-year-old girl who wore the somber gown of a novice nun, but who was not one, and who, moreover, certainly didn't _act_ like one. Why, last Sunday during the priest's long sermon, Lady Rogue's head had nodded forward, and only Sam's loud, false coughing in the bench behind her had awakened her in time for her to escape detection by the sharp-eyed abbess.

" It is Sam's turn to wear the hood," Rogue agreed promptly, handing Sam the hood. Smiling, she watched the children scamper off to their favorite hiding places, then she picked up the wimple and short woolen veil she'd taken off in order to be the hoodman. Intending to go over to the communal well where the villagers were eagerly questioning some men passing on their way to their homes from the war.

"Lady Rogue!" One of the village men called suddenly, "Come quick—there's news for you."

The veil and wimple forgotten in her hand, Rogue broke into a run, and the children, sensing the excitement, stopped their game and raced along at her heels.

"What news?" Rogue asked breathlessly, her gaze searching the stolid faces of the groups of clansmen. One of them stepped forward, respectfully removing his helm and cradling it in the crook of his arm. "Are you the daughter of the Duke Logan Dancanto ?"

At the mention of the name Dancanto, two of the men at the well suddenly stopped in the act of pulling up a bucket of water and exchanged startled, malevolent glances before they quickly ducked their heads again, keeping their faces in shadow. "Yes," Rogue said eagerly. "You have news of my father?"

"Aye, milady. He's coming this way, not far behind us, with a big band of men."

"Thank God," Rogue breathed. "How goes the battle at Louisiana?" she asked after a moment, ready now to forget her personal concerns and devote her worry to the battle.

His face answered Rogue's question even before he said, " 'That was all but over when we left. In last battle it looked like we might win, until the devil hisself came to take command of Guild's army."

"The devil?" Rogue repeated blankly.


	3. Chapter 3

Hi there everyone like previous I don't own X-men or anything else…Thank you for your attention hope you will like this story…^ ^" Thank you very much for my 1st review it's honor for me.

Hatred contorted the man's face and he spat on the ground. "Yes, the devil— Le Diable Blanc hisself, may he roast in hell from whence he was spawned."

Two of the peasant women crossed themselves as if to ward off evil at the mention of him, most hated, and most feared, enemy, but the man's next words made them gape in fear: "He is comin' back... The Guild is sending him here with a fresh army to crush us for supporting war against them. 'Twill be murder and bloodshed like the last time he came, only worst, you mark me. The clans are making haste to come home and get ready for the battles. I'm thinkin' the Devil will attack Dancanto's first, before any o' the rest of us, for 'twas your clan that took the most their lives at Louisiana."

So saying, he nodded politely, put on his helmet, then he swung up onto his horse.

The scraggly groups at the well departed soon afterward, heading down the road that led across the moors and wound upward into the hills.

Two of the men, however, did not continue beyond the bend in the road. Once out of sight of the villagers, they veered off to the right, sending their horses at a furtive gallop into the forest.

Had Rogue been watching, she might have caught a brief glimpse of them doubling back through the woods that ran beside the road right behind her. But at the time, she was occupied with the terrified pandemonium that had broken out among the citizens.

"The Devil is coming!" one of the women cried, clutching her babe protectively to her breast. "God have _pity_ on us."

" 'Tis Dancanto's he'll strike at," a man shouted, his voice rising in fear. " 'Tis the Dancanto's he'll want in his jaws"

Suddenly the air was filled with gruesome predictions of fire and death and slaughter, and the children crowded around Rogue, clinging to her in mute horror. To villager, Le Diable Blanc was more evil than the devil himself, and more dangerous, for the devil was a spirit, while the Le Diable Blanc was flesh and blood—the living Lord of Evil—a monstrous being who threatened their existence, right here on earth. He was the malevolent specter used to terrify their offspring into behaving. "The Le Diable Blanc will get you," was the warning issued to keep children from straying into the woods or leaving their beds at night, or from disobeying their elders.

Impatient with such hysteria over what was, to her, more myth than man, Rogue raised her voice in order to be heard over the din. " 'Tis more likely," she called, putting her arms around the terrified children who'd crowded against her at the first mention of the Le Diable Blanc name, "that he'll go back to his heathen king so that he can lick the wounds we gave him at while he tells great lies to exaggerate his victory. And if he does not do that, he'll choose a weaker keep than Dancantos for his attack—one he's a chance of breeching."

Her words and her tone of amused disdain brought startled gazes flying to her face, but it wasn't merely false bravado that had made Rogue speak so: She was a Dancanto, and a Dancanto never admitted to fear of any man. She had heard that hundreds of times when her father spoke to her stepbrothers, and she had adopted his creed for her own. Furthermore, the villagers were frightening the children, which she refused to let continue.

Mary tugged at Rogue's skirts to get her attention, and in a shrill little voice, she asked, "Isn't _you_ afraid of the Le Diable Blanc, Lady Rogue?"

"Of course not!" Rogue said with a bright, reassuring smile.

"They say," young Jamie interjected in an awed voice, "the Le Diable Blanc is as tall as a tree!"

"A tree!" Rogue chuckled, trying to make a huge joke of the Le Diable Blanc and all the lore surrounding him. "If he is, that would be a sight worth seeing when he tries to mount his horse! Why, it would take _four_ squires to hoist him up there!"

The absurdity of that image made some of the children giggle, exactly as Rogue had hoped.

"I heard," said young Will with an eloquent shudder, "he tears down walls with his bare hands and drinks blood!"

"Yuk!" said Rogue with twinkling eyes. "Then it's only indigestion which makes him so mean. If he comes here, we'll offer him some good south diner instead."

"My pa said," put in another child, "he rides with a giant beside him, a Goliath called Colosus who carries a war axe and chops up children…"

"I heard—" another child interrupted ominously.

Rogue cut in lightly, "Let me tell you what _I_ have heard." With a bright smile, she began to shepherd them toward the abbey, which was out of sight just beyond a bend down the road. "_I_ heard," she improvised gaily, "that he's so very old that he has to squint to see, just like this—"

She screwed up her face in a comical exaggeration of a befuddled, near-blind person peering around blankly, and the children giggled.

As they walked along, Rogue kept up the same light-hearted teasing comments, and the children fell in with the game, adding their own suggestions to make the Devil seem absurd.

But despite the laughter and seeming gaiety of the moment, the sky had suddenly darkened as a bank of heavy clouds rolled in, and the air was turning bitingly cold, whipping Rogue's cloak about her, as if nature herself brooded at the mention of such evil.

Rogue was about to make another joke at the Le Diable Blanc's expense, but she broke off abruptly as a group of mounted clansmen rounded the bend from the abbey, coming toward her down the road. A beautiful girl, clad as Rogue was in the somber gray gown, white wimple, and short gray veil of a novice nun, was mounted in front of the leader, sitting demurely sideways in his saddle, her timid smile confirming what Rogue already knew.

With a silent cry of joy, Rogue started to dash forward, then checked the unladylike impulse and made herself stay where she was. Her eyes clung to her father, then drifted briefly over her clansmen, who were staring past her with the same grim disapproval they'd shown her for years—ever since her stepbrother had successfully circulated his horrible tale.

Sending the children ahead with strict orders to go directly to the abbey, Rogue waited in the middle of the road for what seemed like an eternity until, at last, the group halted in front of her.

Her father, who'd obviously stopped at the abbey where Kitty, Rogue's stepsister, was also staying, swung down from his horse, then he turned to lift Kitty down. Rogue chafed at the delay, but his scrupulous attention to courtesy and dignity was so typical of the great man that a wry smile touched her lips.

Finally, he turned fully toward her, opening his arms wide. Rogue hurtled into his embrace, hugging him fiercely, babbling in her excitement: "Father, I've missed you so! It's nearly two years since I've seen you! Are you well? You look well. You've scarce changed in all this time!"

Gently disentangling her arms from about his neck, Logan Dancanto set his daughter slightly away from him while his gaze drifted over her tousled hair, rosy cheeks, and badly rumpled gown. Rogue squirmed inwardly beneath his prolonged scrutiny, praying that he approved of what he saw and that, since he'd obviously stopped at the abbey already, the abbess's report had been pleasing to him.

Two years ago, her behavior had gotten her sent to the abbey; a year ago, Kitty had been sent down here for safety's sake while the duke was at war. Under the abbess's firm guidance, Rogue had come to appreciate her strengths, and to try to overcome her faults. But as her father inspected her from head to toe, she couldn't help wondering if he saw the young lady she was now or the unruly girl she'd been two years ago. His eyes finally returned to her face and there was a smile in them. "You have become a woman, kid."

Rogue's heart soared; coming from her taciturn father, such a comment constituted high praise. "I've changed in other ways too, Father," she promised, her eyes shining. "I've changed a great deal."

"Not _that_ much, my girl."he looked pointedly at the short veil and wimple hanging forgotten from her fingertips.

"Oh!" Rogue said, laughing and anxious to explain. "I was playing hoodman-blind… er… with the children, and it wouldn't fit beneath the hood. Have you seen the abbess? What did Mother Irene tell you?"

Laughter sparked in his somber eyes. "She told me," he replied dryly, "that you have a habit of sitting on yon hill and gazing off into the air, dreaming, which sounds familiar, lassie. And she told me you have a tendency to nod off in the midst of mass, should the priest sermonize longer than you think seemly, which also sounds familiar."

Rogue's heart sank at this seeming betrayal from the abbess whom she so admired. In a sense, Mother Irene was laird of her own grand demesne, controlling revenues from the farmlands and livestock that belonged to the splendid abbey, presiding at table whenever there were visitors, and dealing with all other matters that involved the laymen who worked on the abbey grounds as well as the nuns who lived cloistered within its soaring walls.

Kitty was terrified of the stern woman, but Rogue loved her, and so the abbess's apparent betrayal cut deeply.

Her father's next words banished her disappointment. "Mother Irene also told me," he admitted with gruff pride, "that you've a head on your shoulders befitting an abbess herself. She said you're a Dancanto through and through, with courage enough to be laird of your own clan. But you'll no' be that," he warned, dashing Rogue's fondest dream.

With an effort, Rogue kept the smile pinned to her face, refusing to feel the hurt of being deprived of that right—a right that had been promised to her until her father married Kitty's widowed mother and acquired three stepsons in the bargain.

Lance, the eldest of the three brothers, would assume the position that had been promised to her. That, in itself, wouldn't have been nearly so hard to bear if Lance had been nice, or even fair-minded, but he was a treacherous, scheming liar, and Rogue knew it, even if her father and her clan did not. Within a year after coming to live at Dancanto keep, he'd begun carrying tales about her, tales so slanderous and ghastly, but so cleverly contrived, that, over a period of years, he'd turned her whole clan against her. That loss of her clan's affection still hurt unbearably. Even now, when they were looking through her as if she didn't exist for them, Rogue had to stop herself from pleading with them to forgive her for things she had not done.

Kurt, the middle brother, was like Kitty—sweet and as timid as can be—while Toad, the youngest, was as evil and as sneaky as Lance. "The abbess also said," her father continued, "that you're kind and gentle, but you've spirit, too…"

"She said all that?" Rogue asked, dragging her dismal thoughts from her stepbrothers. "Truly?"

"Yes" Rogue would normally have rejoiced in that answer, but she was watching her father's face, and it was becoming more grim and tense than she had ever seen it. Even his voice was strained as he said, " 'Tis well you've given up your heathenish ways and that you're all the things you've become, Rogue."

He paused as if unable or unwilling to continue, and Rogue prodded gently, "Why is that, Father?"

"Because," he said, drawing a long, harsh breath, "the future of Dancanto's will depend on your answer to my next question."

His words trumpeted in her mind like blasts from a clarion, leaving Rogue dazed with excitement and joy: "_The future of Dancanto's depends on you_ …"She was so happy, she could scarcely trust her ears. It was as if she were up on the hill overlooking the abbey, dreaming her favorite daydream—the one where her father always came to her and said, "_Rogue, the future of Dancanto depends on you. Not your stepbrothers. You_." It was the chance she'd been dreaming of to prove her mettle to her clansmen and to win back their affection. In that daydream, she was always called upon to perform some incredible feat of daring, some brave and dangerous deed, like scaling the wall of the Le Diable Blanc's castle and capturing him single-handedly. But no matter how daunting the task, she never questioned it, nor hesitated a second to accept the challenge.

She searched her father's face. "What would you have me do?" she asked eagerly. "Tell me, and I will! I'll do any—"

"Will you _marry_ Nathaniel Essex?"

"Whaaat?" gasped the horrified heroine of Rogue's daydream. Nathaniel Essex was older than her; a wizened, frightening man who'd looked at her in a way that made her skin crawl ever since she'd begun to change from girl to maiden.

"Will you, or will you no'?"

Rogue's delicate auburn brows snapped together. "Why?" asked the heroine who never questioned.

A strange, haunted look darkened his face. "We took a beating at Louisiana, —we lost half our men. Lance was killed in battle. He died like a Dancanto," he added with grim pride, "fighting to the end."

"I'm glad for your sake, Papa," she said, unable to feel more than a brief pang of sorrow for the stepbrother who'd made her life into a hell. Now, as she often had in the past, she wished there were something _she_ could do to make him proud of _her_. "I know you loved him as if he were your own son."

Accepting her sympathy with a brief nod, he returned to the discussion at hand: "There were many amongst the clans who were opposed to going to Louisiana to fight but the clans followed me anyway. It's no secret that 'twas my influence which brought the clans to Louisiana, and now the Guild wants vengeance. They are sending the Le Diablo Blanc to attack Dancanto's keep." Ragged pain edged his deep voice as he admitted, "We'll no' be able to withstand a siege now, not unless the Essex clan comes to support us in our fight. The Nathaniel Essex has enough influence with a dozen other clans to force them to join us as well."

Rogue's mind was reeling. Lance was dead, and the White Devil really _was_ coming to attack her home…

Her father's harsh voice snapped her out of her daze. "Rogue! Do you ken what I've been saying? Nathaniel Essex has promised to join in our fight, but only if you'll have him for husband."

Through her mother, Rogue was a countess and heiress to a rich estate which marched with Essex's. "He wants my lands?" she said almost hopefully, remembering the awful way Nathaniel Essex's eyes had wandered down her body when he'd stopped at the abbey a year ago to pay a "social call" upon her.

"Yes."

"Couldn't we just _give_ them to him in return for his support?" she volunteered desperately, ready—willing—to sacrifice a splendid demesne without hesitation, for the good of her people.

"He'd not agree to that!" her father said angrily. "There's honor in fighting for kin, but he could no' send his people into a fight that's no' their own, and then take your lands in payment to _him_."

"But, surely, if he wants my lands badly enough, there's some way—"

"He wants _you_. He sent word to me in Louisiana." His gaze drifted over Rogue's face, registering the startling changes that had altered her face from its thin, freckled, girlish plainness into a face of almost exotic beauty. "You have your mother's look about you now, lass, and it's whetted the appetites of an old man. I'd no' ask this of you if there was any other way." Gruffly, he reminded her, "You used to plead me to name you laird. Ye said there was naught you wouldn't do for your clan…"

Rogue's stomach twisted into sick knots at the thought of committing her body, her entire life, into the hands of a man she instinctively recoiled from, but she lifted her head and bravely met her father's gaze. "Yes, father," she said quietly. "Shall I come with you now?"

The look of pride and relief on his face almost made the sacrifice worthwhile. He shook his head. " 'Tis best you stay here with Kitty. We've no horses to spare and we're anxious to reach our lands and begin preparations for battle. I'll send word to the Essex that the marriage is agreed upon, and then send someone here to fetch you to him."

When he turned to remount his horse, Rogue gave into the temptation she'd been fighting all along: Instead of standing aside, she moved into the rows of mounted clansmen who had once been her friends and playmates. Hoping that some of them had perhaps heard her agree to marry the Essex and that this might neutralize their contempt of her, she paused beside the horse of a ruddy, red-headed man. "Good day to you, Pietro," she said, smiling hesitantly into his hooded gaze. "How fares your lady wife?"

His jaw hardened, his cold eyes flickering over her. "Well enough, I imagine," he snapped.

Rogue swallowed at the unmistakable rejection from the man who had once taught her to fish and laughed with her when she fell into the stream.

Only old Charles, the clan's armorer, pulled his ancient horse to a halt, letting the others go on ahead. Leaning down, he laid his callused palm atop her bare head. "I know you speak truly, Rogue," he said, and his unceasing loyalty brought the sting of tears to her eyes as she gazed up into his soft brown ones. "You have a temper, there's no denying it, but even when ye were but a wee thing, ye kept it bridled. The others might o' been fooled by Lance, but not me. You'll no' see me grieving o'er the loss o' him! The clan will be better by far wit' young Kurt leading it…they'll come about in their thinking of you, once you marry the Essex for their sake as well as your sire's."

"Where are my stepbrothers?" Rogue asked hoarsely, changing the subject lest she burst into tears.

"They're coming home by a different route. We couldn't be sure the Devil wouldn't try to attack us while we marched, so we split up." With another pat on her head, he spurred his horse forward.

As if in a daze, Rogue stood stock-still in the middle of the road, watching her clan ride off and disappear around the bend.

"It grows dark," Kitty said beside her, her gentle voice filled with sympathy. "We should go back to the abbey now."

The abbey. Three short hours ago, Rogue had walked away from the abbey feeling cheery and alive. Now she felt—dead. "Go ahead without me. I—I can't go back there. Not yet. I think I'll walk up the hill and sit for a while."

"The abbess will be annoyed if we aren't back before dusk, and it's near that now," Kitty said apprehensively. It had always been thus between the two girls, with Rogue breaking a rule and Kitty terrified of bending one. Kitty was gentle, biddable, and beautiful, with blond hair, hazel eyes, and a sweet disposition that made her, in Rogue's eyes, the embodiment of womanhood at its best. She was also as meek and timid as Rogue was impulsive and courageous. Without Rogue, she'd not have had a single adventure—nor ever gotten a scolding. Without Kitty to worry about and protect, Rogue would have had many more adventures—and many more scoldings. As a result, the two girls were entirely devoted to each other, and tried to protect one another as much as possible from the inevitable results of each other's shortcomings.

Kitty hesitated and then volunteered with only a tiny tremor in her voice, "I'll stay with you. If you remain alone, you'll forget about time and likely be pounced upon by a—a bear in the darkness."

At the moment, the prospect of being killed by a bear seemed rather inviting to Rogue, whose entire life stretched before her, shrouded in gloom and foreboding. Despite the fact that she truly wanted, needed, to stay outdoors and try to reassemble her thoughts, Rogue shook her head, knowing that if they stayed, Kitty would be drowning in fear at the thought of facing the abbess. "No, we'll go back."

Ignoring Rogues words, Kitty clasped Rogue's hand and turned to the left, toward the slope of the hill that overlooked the abbey, and for the first time it was Kitty who led and Rogue who followed.

In the woods beside the road, two shadows moved stealthily, staying parallel with the girls' path up the hill.

By the time they were partway up the steep incline, Rogue had already grown impatient with her own self-pity, and she made a Herculean effort to shore up her flagging spirits. "When you think on it," she offered slowly, directing a glance at Kitty, " 'tis actually a grand and noble thing I've been given the opportunity to do—marrying the Essex for the sake of my people."

"You are just like Joan of Arc," Kitty agreed eagerly, "leading her people to victory!"

"Except that I'm marrying Nathaniel Essex."

"And," Kitty finished encouragingly, "suffering a worse fate than she did!"

Laughter widened Rogue's eyes at this depressing remark, which her well-meaning sister delivered with such enthusiasm.

Encouraged by the return of Rogue's ability to laugh, Kitty cast about for something else with which to divert and cheer her. As they neared the crest of the hill, which was blocked by thick woods, she said suddenly, "What did Father mean about your having your mother's 'look about you'?"

"I don't know," Rogue began, diverted by a sudden, uneasy feeling that they were being watched in the deepening dusk. Turning and walking backward, she looked down toward the well and saw the villagers had all returned to the warmth of their hearths. Drawing her cloak about her, she shivered in the biting wind, and without much interest, she added, "Mother Irene said my looks are a trifle _brazen_ and that I must guard against the effect I will have on males when I leave the abbey."

"What does all that mean?"

Rogue shrugged without concern. "I don't know." Turning and walking forward again, Rogue remembered the wimple and veil in her fingertips and began to put the wimple back on. "What do I look like to you?" she asked, shooting a puzzled glance at Kitty. "I haven't seen my face in two years, except when I caught a reflection of it in the water. Have I changed much?"

"Oh yes," Kitty laughed. "Even Lance wouldn't be able to call you scrawny and plain now"

"Kitty!" Rogue interrupted, thunderstruck by her own callousness. "Are you much grieved by Lance's death? He was your brother and—"

"Don't talk of it any more," Kitty pleaded shakily. "I cried when Father told me, but the tears were few and I feel guilty because I didn't love him as I thought. Not then and not now. I couldn't. He was so—mean-spirited. It's wrong to speak ill of the dead, yet I can't think of much _good_ to say of him." Her voice trailed off, and she pulled her cloak about her in the damp wind, gazing at Rogue in mute appeal to change the subject.

"Tell me how I look, then," Rogue invited quickly, giving her sister a quick, hard hug.

They stopped walking, their way blocked by the dense woods that covered the rest of the slope. A slow, thoughtful smile spread across Kitty's beautiful face as she studied her stepsister, her hazel eyes roving over Rogue's expressive face, which was dominated by a pair of large eyes as clear as dark green emerald beneath gracefully winged, auburn brows. "Well, you're—you're quite pretty!"

"Good, but do you see anything _unusual_ about me?" Rogue asked, thinking of Mother Irene's words as she put her wimple back on and pinned the short woolen veil in place atop it. "Anything at all which might make a male behave oddly?"

"No," Kitty stated, for she saw Rogue through the eyes of a young innocent. "Nothing at all." A man would have answered very differently, for although Rogue Dancanto wasn't pretty in the conventional way, her looks were both striking and provocative. She had a generous mouth that beckoned to be kissed, eyes like liquid emeralds that shocked and invited, hair like lush, auburn - satin with unique white streaks, and a slender, voluptuous body that was made for a man's hands.

"Your eyes are green," Brenna began helpfully, trying to describe her, and Rogue chuckled.

"They were green two years ago," she said. Kitty opened her mouth to answer, but the words became a scream that was stifled by a man's hand that clapped over her mouth as he began dragging her backward into the dense cover of the woods.

Rogue ducked, instinctively expecting an attack from behind, but she was too late. Kicking and screaming against a gloved male hand, she was plucked from her feet and hauled into the woods. Kitty was tossed over the back of her captor's horse like a sack of flour, her limp limbs attesting to the fact that she'd fainted, but Rogue was not so easily subdued. As her faceless adversary dumped her over the back of his horse, she threw herself to the side, rolling free, landing in the leaves and dirt, crawling on all fours beneath his horse, then scrambling to her feet. He caught her again, and Rogue raked her nails down his face, twisting in his hold. "God's teeth!" he hissed, trying to hold onto her flailing limbs. Rogue let out a blood-chilling scream, at the same moment she kicked as hard as she could, landing a hefty blow on his shin with the sturdy, black boots which were deemed appropriate footware for novice nuns. A grunt of pain escaped the blond man as he let her go for a split second. She bolted forward and might even have gained a few yards if her booted foot hadn't caught under a thick tree root and sent her sprawling onto her face, smacking the side of her head against a rock when she landed.

"Hand me the rope," the Devil's brother said, a grim smile on his face as he glanced at his companion. Pulling his limp captive's cloak over her head, Henry Lebeau yanked it around her body, using it to pin her arms at her sides, then took the rope from his companion and tied it securely around Rogue's middle. Finished, he picked up his human bundle and tossed it ignominiously over his horse, her derrière pointing skyward, then he swung up into the saddle behind her.

**Chapter Two (meeting)**

"Remy will scarce believe our good fortune," Henry called to the rider beside him whose prisoner was also bound and draped across his saddle. "Imagine—Dancanto's girls standing beneath that tree as ripe for plucking as apples from a branch. Now there's no reason for us to have a look at Dancanto's defenses—he'll surrender without a fight."

Tightly bound in her dark woolen prison, her head pounding and her stomach slamming against the horse's back with each lift of the beast's hooves, the name "Remy" made Rogue's blood freeze. Remy LeBeau, The white Devil. The horrifying stories she'd heard of him no longer seemed nearly so farfetched. Kitty and she had been seized by men who showed no reverence whatsoever for the habits of the order of St. Albans which the girls wore, habits that indicated their status of novice—aspiring nuns who had not yet taken their vows. What manner of men, Rogue wondered frantically, would lay their hands on nuns, or almost-nuns, without conscience or fear of retribution, human or divine. No man would. Only a devil and his disciples would dare!

"This one's fainted dead away," Theo said with a lewd laugh. "A pity we haven't more time to sample our loot, although, were it left to me, I'd prefer that tasty morsel you have wrapped in your blanket, Henry."

"Yours is the beauty of the two," Henry replied coldly, "and you're not sampling anything until Remy decides what he wants to do with these two."

Nearly suffocating with fear inside her blanket, Rogue made a tiny cry of mindless, panicked protest in her throat, but no one heard her. She prayed to God to strike her captors dead on their horses, but God didn't seem to hear her, and the horses trotted endlessly, painfully onward. She prayed to be shown some sort of plan to escape, but her mind was too busy, frantically tormenting her with all the gruesome tales of the deadly Le Diablo Blanc: _He keeps no prisoners unless he_ means _to torture them. He laughs when his victims scream with pain. He drinks their blood_…"she began to pray, not for escape, for she knew in her heart there would be no escape. Instead she prayed that death would come quickly and that she would not disgrace her proud family name. Her father's voice came back to her as he stood in the hall at Dancanto, instructing her stepbrothers when they were young: "_If it is the Lord's will that you die at the hands of the enemy, then do it bravely. Die fighting like a warrior. Like a Dancanto! Die fighting_…

The phrases ranted through her mind, hour after hour, around and around, yet when the horses slowed and she heard distant, unmistakable sounds of a large encampment of men, fury began to overcome her fear. She was much too young to die, she thought, and it wasn't fair! And now gentle Kitty was going to die and that would be Rogue's fault, too. She would have to face the good Lord with that deed on her conscience. And all because a bloodthirsty ogre was roaming the land, devouring everything in his path.

Her thundering heart doubled its beat as the horses came to a jarring stop. All around her, metal clanked against metal as men moved about and then she heard the prisoners' voices—men's voices crying pathetically for mercy, "Have pity, Devil—Pity," The awful chants were rising to a shout as she was unceremoniously yanked from her horse.

"Remy," her captor called out, "stay there—we've brought you something!"

Completely blinded by the cloak which had been thrown over her head, and her arms still bound by the rope, she was tossed over her captor's shoulder. Beside her, she heard Kitty scream her name as they were carried forward.

"Be brave, Kitty," Rogue cried, but her voice was muffled by the cloak, and she knew her terrified sister couldn't hear her.

Rogue was abruptly lowered to the ground and pushed forward. Her legs were numb and she stumbled, falling heavily to her knees. _Die like a Dancanto. Die bravely. Die fighting_, the chant raged through her mind as she tried ineffectually to raise herself. Above her, the Devil spoke for the first time and she knew the voice was his. The voice was gravelly, fiery—a voice straight from the bowels of hell. "What is this? Something to eat, I hope."

'_Tis said he eats the flesh of those he kills_… Young Thomas's words came back to her while rage blended with the sound of Kitty's scream and the calls for pity from the prisoners. The rope around her arms was suddenly jerked loose. Driven by the twin demons of fear and fury, Rogue surged clumsily to her feet, her arms flailing at the cloak, looking like an enraged ghost trying to fling off its shroud. And the moment it fell away, Rogue doubled up her fist and swung with all her might at the dark, demonic, shadowy giant before her, striking him on the jaw bone.

Kitty fainted.

"_Monster_!" Rogue shouted. "_Barbarian_!" and she swung again, but this time her fist was caught in a painful viselike grip and held high above her head. "_Devil_!" she cried, squirming, and she landed a mighty kick at his shin. "Spawn of Satan! Despoiler of innoc—!"

"What the—!" Remy LeBeau roared, and reaching out, he caught his assailant at the waist and jerked her off her feet, holding her at arm's length, high in the air. It was a mistake. Her booted foot struck out again, catching Remy squarely in the groin with an impact that nearly doubled him over.

**To be continue….**


End file.
